Caron Cake Unwound (Literally…)

I’ve had some time to play with Caron Cakes and wanted to share my “after my first craze” impressions and discoveries.

In the name of experiment, I literally unwounded a cake.  I am making a Demezla blanket (design by Catherine Bligh), which was originally released earlier this year. Esther over at It’s All in A Nutshell is hosting a biweekly crochet-along (CAL) with her video tutorials, which just started last week.  She is starting with small corner squares, so I figured this will give me a perfect excuse to unwind a Caron Cake so each square can have multiple colors from this beautiful yarn.  I am using Cherry Chip color, which comes with shades of pink and red.

Here is one cake rewound into smaller cakes by color.

Yardage

Each cake came out weighing 34 grams.  At 383 yards / 200 g, each color appears to be approximately 65 yards long.

Colors

In addition to Cherry Chip, I bought Faerie Cake and Blueberry Cheesecake colors.  All these three cakes have at least one color that is really bright.  This pushes me outside of my comfort zone of preferring similar shades & tones but they do look good.

It is not a gradient yarn on which color changes gradually.  On Caron Cake, the colors change abruptly like in the picture blow.

Some light colors do have some darker specks of different shades towards the ends, like in this picture below.

I could not get a good picture to show, but the white yarn in Faerie Cake color has a very slight turquoise tone.

Also, I cannot find lot numbers on the sleeve of the yarn, but there are slight variations in colors by skein.  It is hard to see but in the picture below, the border of the upper right corner square was made with a different skein than the others.  It is a more yellowish brown than the rest.

Machine washing & drying

One thing that really made me nervous when I first saw the yarn label was it says it is to be handwashed as it has 20% wool.  As I am planning on making afghans with this yarn, I didn’t really want to have to handwash it every time.  So I got brave and put it in the washer and dryer…

Now, I know not all washers are made equally so please do not take this as Caron Cake can be machine washed.  I am just reporting that it worked on MY washing machine and dryer.

We own Maytag front loading washer and dryer that are both 7 years old.  I put my squares in a lingerie mesh wash bag and washed them with cold water at low spin speed in my Maytag washing machine.

I then put it under low heat in my Maytag dryer and took them out when they are slightly damp so I can block them.

And the end results?

There was no visible color bleeding, shrinking, or felting.  Here is a side by side picture of my unwashed square (left) and machine washed and dried square (right).

The yarn did smell like a clean wet dog when it came out of the washer, though!  LOL!

Overall Impression

Overall, I continue to be very thrilled about this yarn and cannot wait to make more projects with it.  The yarn is very soft and is easy to work with.  I am using a 5.5 mm hook but I think 5.0 mm or 6.0 mm will also work, depending on your tension.

I did notice that the yarn is very slightly itchy against bare skin but this is likely my skin sensitivity (I am a type of person who cannot wear clothes with tags attached).  I think the yarn will be perfect for afghan but I probably won’t be using it for any garment for myself (which I was not planning on doing in the first place).

I promise I will use Caron Cake’s colors to fall naturally when I turn my Helen Shrimpton‘s Moon’s Shadow square into an Around-the-Bases afghan.  But in the meantime, I am loving these beautiful colors. Don’t you?